Fantasy Fest; it was fun, but now you must go.. Part ONE

Well, I survived it. There were times I thought I wouldn’t. And I wasn’t even HERE for the last big hurrah on Halloween night.

The weekend before Halloween my friend Walter came into town for his ‘bachelor party’. It was just he and I, so I figured how bad could it be.. well we pretty much completely wore ourselves out that weekend..

I never made it to Goombay festival like I wanted to, but I had a great time anyway. I think Walter may have had a bit more fun than I did however because when Monday rolled up and it was time for him to get on the ferry back to Ft Myers at 6:00, he was no where to be found.

He did eventually show up, but far too late in the day to make it to the ferry, so the missus and I didn’t get to have that lull in the action before the next wave of revelers came in Tuesday.

He had so much fun in fact, that we had to call a Doctor who makes house calls (I love Key West) to check him out on Tuesday, turns out he had smoked and drank so much that he was on the verge of pneumonia.. well a few steroid shots, and some antibiotics later, I shoveled him onto the boat and promptly sighed a very heavy sigh of relief. It was all up to his fiance at that point, haha.

For those of you who know Walter, you feel my pain I’m sure. At least the next wave of friends were relatively tame and responsible by comparison.

The real kicker to that story is I had to leave that coming Friday morning to drive to Orlando to be in his wedding, so at best I was in the eye of the hurricane, AND I was going to miss my first Fantasy Fest Parade. Remind me to never agree to be in another wedding….

As it turns out, our Tuesday guests became Wednesday guests so we wound up having our night to lay like broccoli on the couch.. a VERY much needed respite. We eventually couldn’t resist, and decided to leave the couch for a couple of hours and make one pass down Duval, just to get a feel for our first Fantasy Fest.

By this time the night-time crowds on Duval were getting increasingly large and more naked. We wandered about sipping a couple of Coronas trying to take in all the madness. We were too wiped out to really spend too much time out, or to really register how many sets of boobs or male genitalia wrapped in sparkle wrap we’d seen. We snapped a few photos and headed back to the apartment to crash. It was all very surreal, and we were beginning to understand just how insane this was going to be…

I’ll get to the real meat of the adventures in my next post. Right now I have to run out to Fort Zach and start tearing down the haunted fort. When that’s done in a week, life will finally be back to something resembling normal. Next adventure is to find a job!

P.S…. no that is NOT Christina in that photo up there..